


Folie a Deux

by chezchuckles



Series: Army Castle [8]
Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: Army Spy, F/M, spy castle - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:15:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 21,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28184520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chezchuckles/pseuds/chezchuckles
Summary: Often, Beckett has to live her life without Castle. Other times, it's a madness shared by two.
Relationships: Kate Beckett & Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle
Series: Army Castle [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1945063
Comments: 22
Kudos: 44





	1. Chapter 1

Beckett was awake of course.

The light was beginning to bleach the skyline a dingy yellow, but she stood with her back to the windows, assembling note cards. She had spent all night scrawling the elements of her mother’s case in black permanent marker, and she had more here than she’d suspected.

But nothing went together. She had thought to string yarn between the pertinent facts, but she had no solid ties. Instead she had a thick weight of cards in her hand and the bare wall over her office desk, and it wouldn’t be enough space.

It was into this stilted indecision that the rap came to her door, a heavy fist, that official police business kind of thump. 

Only a couple people had that knock, but it was the scrape of a key in the lock that let her know exactly who it was barging into her pre-dawn morning.

Agent Castle. She beat him to the lock, flipped it with an angry jerk of her wrist, and opened the door. He had come to see her before he shipped out (she still called it that in her head even though she knew he was a CIA agent working undercover assignments halfway around the world). This time Marrakesh, thought he shouldn’t have told her.

She hadn’t expected him to come. He had braced his hands against the door frame, leaning into her, asking without asking, and she lifted her fingers from the door and hooked them around his wrist. It looked years-healed. As if it had never happened, his bleeding to death on her floor.

She still marveled at it, how fast it had healed, how the scar was already silvered and smooth.

He shook off her questing fingers and instead came for her mouth, claimed a kiss made rougher by their two weeks’ separation. She kicked her own door shut, fingers gripping his clean-shaven cheeks, and he spun her around to slam her against the door, his hips already driving into hers.

She gasped at the invasion of his tongue, this man, after she had spent two weeks hating herself for wanting him this badly, this desperately. He growled and ripped away from her mouth, came down her throat with bruising, teeth-nipping kisses, sucking her skin until he had left marks.

“Let me in, sweetheart,” he husked.

Beckett reflexively widened her thighs for him, bucked into the trap of his body. He cursed her name at the collar of her shirt, his hands already diving for the button of her jeans, tugging, pulling, shedding her clothes before she realized she’d responded so willingly.

She attacked - yanked the shirt out of his pants, scored her nails at his sides, slid past the waistband of his cargo pants and under his boxer briefs. She gripped his ass fiercely, making him gasp, his head jerking up so fast that he caught her chin.

She saw stars, and zigzags of light, and then him, her spy, and he cupped her face in his hands and stroked at her jaw, staring at her.

“Did that hurt, baby?” he husked. “I hurt you?”

“Not if you fuck me,” she found herself saying.

His eyes went like ice and he went for it. Ripped the shirt off over her head, dragged her jeans down her legs, peeling them off, sucking the tender skin of her inside thigh with his mouth as he revealed her. His bite at her knee made her grunt, grip his hair, but he tore away from her to journey down her legs, teeth at her calf, tongue at her bare ankle.

His hands came back up fast even as he knelt before her, sliding inside the legs of her panties and widening over her hips, slamming her back against the door when she tried to move. Her ass smarted with the rough treatment, her shoulder blades ached, but Castle twisted his wrists and jerked her panties down her legs.

“Take off the bra,” he commanded.

She had to arch as she fumbled for the back clasp. Castle watched her from his knees, stroking her thighs and eyeing her breasts as they were thrust forward with her movement. She was too worked up to tease, had missed him the sharpest these past two weeks - knowing he was one city removed from her, doing training in DC after the whole fuck-up with those diamonds. He hadn’t even been able to call her, despite leaving her the laptop with its video chat program. She’d gotten nothing of him, and he’d been on the same continent. 

So close and so far.

“Get it off, Beckett, or I will tear it off of you.”

She was tempted, but the bra was new, and expensive, and she had a terrible salary.

She had just bought boots with him in mind, pointy, sharp boots that would bring her up as tall as he was - and those had been nearly three hundred dollars - she wasn’t blowing her budget just because he was impatient.

She got the bra off herself, dangled it from her fingertips just past his head.

Before she could release it, Castle buried his head between her thighs.

\-----

She rode his mouth, her back raw against the door with the friction of her writhing, her legs twined around his shoulders and beneath his armpits.

She was riding his mouth. When had she become this kind of woman? 

But oh hell, it felt so fucking good. His tongue, fuck, fuck, she needed to grind herself against the nasty work of his teeth.

He bit her clit and she shouted his name.

The fingers of one of his hands held her by the ass, squeezing and kneading, while his other arm braced her hips high, cutting across her abs, pinning her to the door. She screamed when his tongue rolled her clit against his teeth, groaned when he backed off to lick down her slit. She was trembling around him, a broad and taut arc of her body to keep herself exactly right there, right there, and he knew exactly what to do.

But before she could work out her orgasm, he cut her off, withdrawing his tongue, sucking at her arousal as he moved his head, kissing her inside thighs as he unwrapped her legs from him.

“No,” she gasped. “No, you can’t stop, you can’t leave me-”

“Not leaving you,” he husked. He sounded like he was still between her legs but he was rising up her limp, sweat-slick body, rubbing his chest against her as he came.

He was staring at her like he wanted to memorize everything, the picture in his head. She brought her hand up to his neck, rubbed the soft hair at his nape as she stared back, dazed by the closeness, the almost-heights he’d pushed her to and the slow ebb again.

When she was almost in control of it, Castle began to lean his full weight against her, crushing her to the door by increments, slowly. Her hips were bearing the brunt of his body, her breasts flattened by his chest. He sank against her until they were flush, and sealed, and both panting.

And then he thrust his hips into her, rattling her against the door. Beckett moaned, eyes dropping closed.

His fingers played at her thighs and widened her up for him; his cock was a heavy pulsing thing between her legs. She felt him there, waiting, and she had to open her eyes, had to see what he looked like, waiting for her, on the threshold but not coming in.

His whole being was lit up for her. His joy was a blue flame that gave off heat, licking at every last secret place. His mouth touched hers, his words hushed.

“I have to be in Marrakesh in twelve hours,” he whispered.

She blinked and tried to do the math. “You won’t make it.”

“I won’t make it,” he admitted. “I had to be here first.”

He rubbed his thumb through her sex and up to her clit, made her gasp, her eyes fighting to stay open and on the glorious ferocity of his gaze. He teased, flicking his flat nail against her, making her raw and desperate, her body clutching around nothing trying to get him. She felt him fumbling at his own pants, his movements getting hasty, bolder, the growl in his chest vibrating them both.

And then he lined his cock up with her cunt.

“I had to be right here first,” he husked. “I had to have you one more time.”

He thrust home and she cried out, her body climbing the door with the invasion of his cock. Castle immediately began a rhythm, a fierce, body-bruising stroke, her back slamming into the wood, her head rolling on her neck, her legs pinned by his.

She was off her toes now; he was carrying her whole weight, beating her against the door. She was going to break, she was going to splinter, she was going to come.

“Rick, please,” she gasped.

His hips pounded, his body worked; she could feel the stretch and cramp of the muscles at his back under her hands, the harsh constriction of his chest against hers, the abrasion of her nipples. He was moaning her name now, begging her; he was desperate for her.

“I have to have you,” he ground out. “Need to have you, Kate. Please.”

She dug her nails into his shoulders and suddenly he tilted her hips, slammed home, and she was bursting with her orgasm, blazing fireworks going off inside her, screaming into the dark night.

He roared and climaxed right after her, his own chasing hers back inside her body, a brutal, thrusting, insistent need.

He dropped first, falling to his knees, and Kate came after him, unable to hold herself up. His arms came around her, pinning her legs around his waist, and he stood once more, carried her back to her bed.

Where she hadn’t slept all night, where the sheets were still cold.

\-----

He had laid her down on the sheets and stood again to strip his clothes off, his eyes never leaving hers. When he’d exposed the full length of his body to her, he crawled into bed and laid over her, their arousal still wet between her thighs and her body still full with him. He stayed there for an interminable time, gazing down at her, nose to nose, breaths mingling and heart rates climbing again.

And then he made his slow way down.

His kiss between her legs was intimate and soft. She mewled and arched, but he held her down, began cleaning the beautiful mess of them from her skin, her cunt, eating her out, licking her thoroughly.

Her pleasure rose, escalating with every thrust of his tongue, every pet of his lips, and then his fingers slid inside her, three wide fingers, so full. She moaned and reached down, gripped what she could reach - an ear, his neck - and Castle climbed upward again.

He kept his fingers between her legs, his hand insistent, demanding one more, one more, his mouth worshiping her breasts. She gasped and her body vibrated at the wet heat of him, the suction at her nipple, the terrible wonderful ache that he rubbed into life between her legs.

She was a string that he was plucking; she was a wire twisting tighter. She had to be closer, deeper, she needed harder, harder-

He thrust inside her without warning and she shattered apart around his cock, wordless and undone as it went on and on.

He pounded hard, a vicious demand, his rhythm unrelenting, his mouth biting her breasts, his body so strong that she was being broken open to him.

“Again,” he chanted. “I’ve only got - only have just this once. Again for me, Kate, again-”

She cried out, her hips thrusting up, meeting him, desperate for it, the pain circling, the pleasure taunting her in his voice. She had to, needed it, had to have-

He gripped her hands and stretched her arms over her head, held her down, crushing her under the weight of his pounding strokes, his cock invading, filling, tearing her open.

“Please, Kate, please, I have to go. I have to have one more, love.” He groaned around her breast and she went rigid.

Her orgasm flooded through her, made all the more intense by the feeling of his cock buried deep and her cunt contracting around him. She had him, she had him, she was milking him so fiercely that he was crying out her name and rocking into her, his own release coming in a wave.

After, they were both panting and limp and skins sealed together; his tongue laved a lazy circle over her nipple and she shivered, drew an arm in for warmth.

Castle slowly lifted up, his cock withdrawing, an ache where he’d been. His eyes roved over her face and he lowered his mouth to touch hers, brief, chaste, sweet.

“I missed my flight,” he husked. “I have to go.”

She strained against his grip on her wrists but he didn’t let go; he just stared down at her, watched her breasts as she struggled.

“Castle.”

His eyes came back to hers - a veil rippled and was gone. Rick stared back at her and then his goofy, little boy smile widened across his face. 

“Hey, Kate,” he murmured. His mouth came down for a kiss - another - sweeter - gentler - and then he was rising from the bed. She watched him silently as he dressed.

He turned back at the last second, tugged the covers up over her body, stroked the hair back from her face, kissed her once more, too intimate, too tender. She turned her head and tried not to let it show on her face.

But he lingered, stroking her hair. “Fight, Kate,” he husked. “You fight. He promised this was the last one, and then I get back the second it’s done.”

“It’s never done,” she murmured. But he was already too far away to hear.

She closed her eyes and turned over in bed, felt his come leaking out across her thighs.

Not even that would stay.

\-----


	2. Chapter 2

She had actually fallen asleep after he’d left.

Beckett stretched out in bed, luxuriating in the rare moment of silence from the city outside. The morning light had just touched the facade of her apartment building and she could smell coffee brewing on the automatic timer.

And she was well-fucked. She could get used to these surprise visits, when she was least expecting him, like a gift she got to unwrap. He came, he saw, he conquered. Fuck, her thighs were bruised-

Her neck.

She was gonna fucking kill him if he had marked her again.

Beckett scrambled out of bed, tripping over the top sheet which had gotten yanked out and was trailing the floor. She stumbled down the hall on shaky legs and stepped into the bathroom naked, turning for the full length mirror behind the door.

Fuck. He had definitely marked her.

Holy shit, that one under her jaw was gonna be hard to explain. The concealer didn’t match so well at her neck either; she’d been thinking about stopping at the drug store and scrounging up a paler color to match. 

Her eyes moved down, following the same trail as his mouth, going from the lurid bites at her collarbone to the apple-shaped bruise over her breast. And then the underside, the curve where her ribs came to meet her sternum had its own mark, as well as the rounded edge of her belly button.

Her thighs were red and raw from the friction of his face and the pinch of his fingers. Bruises had already come up there too.

She was wet just seeing herself. Lately he had been doing that, marking her as if he wanted her to think of him every day as the bruises and bites began to fade. She’d catch herself rubbing the mottled edges like she wanted the reminder.

Whatever.

Beckett ignored the well-loved woman in the mirror and reached for the faucet, flipped on the hot water until it thundered into the tub. She had to adjust it a little, distracted by the twinge in her back, before she started the shower.

Kate shut the bathroom door, lifted her arms over her head to stretch. She felt good, that deep, satisfied contentment that always stole over her after she’d had him. Something about how he filled her, or maybe it was how desperate he was to have her. She didn’t know; she didn’t like to parse it. She just loved how he demanded harder and fiercer and more.

She hummed and found herself staring into space, fingers pressed to her lips. What had he said before he’d left? She’d been sliding into that blank, dark sleep - the kind that came without nightmares, the kind she found after a hard fuck - and he’d laid his hand at her ass and squeezed.

Fight.

Yeah, that sounded like Castle. It was about who came out on top. Sometimes her, sometimes him, though she’d never tell him to his face just how fucking good it was when he forced her down and rose above her.

Fuck, she was going to have to do something about the buzz riding just under her skin.

Kate stepped into the tub and tilted her head back to the spray, letting the heat needle her scalp. Her breasts ached, her thighs were bruised, her insides felt fucking rearranged.

It would stay with her all damn day. Fuck, against the door - had that happened?

On second thought, she wasn’t going to touch herself in the shower. That was a little pathetic. She’d be thinking about him, imagining him, and ruining all the wonderful real things that had happened last night - this morning. She didn’t want to erase all the good feeling he’d brought in the door with him. Brought against the door. 

Fuck, that had been good. If this was all it ever was, this was the best thing to ever happen to her.

And yeah, okay, that was pathetic too. She didn’t even care.

\-----

Beckett checked over her shoulder, but again it was just - city dwellers and tourists. She shook off the creepy-crawly feeling and pushed open the front doors of the Twelfth, heading inside.

She flashed her badge, new as it was, and the lobby security guys waved her forward. She put her tin and keys onto the tray and passed through the metal detector, picked them up on the other side. She clipped her badge to her belt and palmed her keys, headed for the elevator. 

First stop was the bank of personal lockers one floor down to retrieve her service issue. Beckett had been taking her weapon home with her until Castle had dropped that gorgeous gun in her lap. Fuck, even just thinking about it made her cheeks flush. How sleek and dangerous and beautiful it was.

She was daydreaming about it now. 

Beckett huffed at herself and removed her service piece from the locker, checking the clip before sliding it home with a click. She felt prepared for the day now, and she holstered her weapon and pulled it on, wriggling her shoulders to make it sit right. She shrugged on her jacket and headed for the elevator again.

Once on the floor where Vice was housed alongside Burglary, Beckett found her space piled high with case folders, an empty coffee cup, and one of the damn desk phones. 

Fuck. Again.

She was going to have to talk to McMannes about this. Again. This was supposed to be her spot, and she was always cleaning shit off the top of the desk. They shared, but...

Beckett sucked it up. She’d have to deal because crying and complaining wasn’t going to win her any favors.

After Beckett had cleared off her space and sat down in the squeaky rolling chair, she popped open the top drawer and rooted inside for the pen she’d hidden. She found it taped to the underside of the desk at the very back, and she carefully peeled the tape free, releasing the pen.

Castle had given her this one, actually. Just a really fucking nice pen, CIA issue. She shouldn’t have it, but he’d brought one back from some foreign country and it was sinful how smoothly it wrote - every damn time. No name brand, contoured for the hand, an ink that never smeared.

Her detective’s notebook, given to her by her father in one of those rare moments of sobriety and pride (which hardly ever coexisted), was tucked into her middle drawer, also cleverly hidden.

Now that she was ready, Beckett pulled the stack of case files towards her, determined to make a dent in the paperwork before they called her out to the street corner.

\-----

Beckett swayed as the subway car hurtled through the tunnel, exhausted beyond measure. Her feet were killing her. Fuck. Fuck, she hated cheap heels. Next time she was wearing her own damn boots out there.

Her neck rippled with goose bumps and she shifted to one side, wishing she’d taken some pain reliever before she’d left the Twelfth. The crowded subway car wasn’t the place for a headache at the end of the day.

She scraped her hand back through her hair and happened to catch her reflection in the partially-tagged window of the car as it went through the darkness.

There was a man standing entirely too close.

Good-looking, short, the rounded chin giving way to a hardness to his jaw that surprised her. And then the asshole was right at her back, brushing against her, something insistent pressing at her ass that - holy fuck - had better be his thigh.

Kate shifted forward, instinctively reaching for a weapon that wasn’t there.

Right, she’d left it in her locker at work. The beautiful weapon was at home, ready for her in the entry-way table drawer. Doing her no good at all right here on a subway with this asshole.

Of course, pulling her gun on a fellow commuter with personal space issues was one of the fastest ways to get fucking suspended, and now that she had finally made detective she had to be careful.

Why she’d stopped carrying on her way home. She was a lot more paranoid lately, and she didn’t know if it was just Castle rubbing off on her or her mother’s case - all those pieces, all those damn questions.

Fuck. No. Not cool - the guy was on her again. She shifted forward, knocking her shoulder bag into the woman ahead of her. Kate glanced back but the guy had melted into nothing, just like that, as if he’d never been there.

Beckett shifted back, one hand coming out to the pole to steady her. She craned her neck but the man was like a damn ghost.

Maybe it was her. For the last two weeks, she’d felt eyes on her everywhere she went.

Probably just that fucker Deleware, because he gave her the creeps, because Castle’s asshole of a father apparently wanted her put under surveillance after the whole nearly-got-his-hand-chopped-off thing. 

That thing where Castle had come to her bleeding to death, his hand practically severed, telling her he couldn’t trust his father, his father had set him up.

She couldn’t possibly have forgotten that little fact. It weighed on her, in the really blackest of nights, what he’d meant by that. His father had set him up, it was a test and I failed. That’s what he’d said that night, and now she was being followed, and the confluence made her paranoid.

She was still under careful scrutiny after she’d brought in Deleware for the ‘landing-a-plane-in-New-York’ fiasco, though the pilot for that stunt had been Castle, of course, nearly fatally wounded and just trying to get back to her. Not to DC where his father had a whole fucking medical team, but to her. 

She had never really liked Black much - just the things Castle said about him - but now there was this tangled mess of CIA politics and Rick’s better-late-than-never teen rebellion. So now she was seeing conspiracies where there weren’t any and she was finding strangers who stood too close a cause to reach for her weapon. She needed a damn break.

Maybe she ought to call his therapist guy again. King. He’d been - stabilizing the last time.

\-----

It happened so fast.

She would remember this moment for the rest of her life - how she had ignored her instincts because she’d been afraid that Castle had gotten to her, afraid to admit that his presence meant something had changed for her.

She’d remember the way it felt, to know suddenly and totally that she should have been listening to that voice that told her Castle was good for her - because if she had - if she had been listening, she would have heard its warnings: 

Malevolence had followed her home; the evil she’d been sensing for weeks now was real and solid and wanted to do violence.

Beckett had her key in the door when she knew. It had come for her. 

She sensed the abrupt movement at her back the second before she was bodily slammed forward. Her face smashed into her front door, fingers mangled around her set of keys with the weight of another person, but her training kicked in with a jolt.

Beckett still had hold of her keys, so she swung around to gouge at the face of her attacker. Her viciousness caught him off-guard and he ducked back, exposing his face.

The man from the subway. 

And then her keys ripped across the meaty part of his cheek. 

It was all so subdued, this fight for her life, so grunting and silent. His grip was suffocating around her neck, and she gripped fingers to pry them back, each of them vying for dominance and barely moving in the struggle.

His punch caught her in the face before she saw it coming and she gasped, head ricocheting off the creaking door. Another fist to her gut made her double up, and then his meaty hand was snagging her hair.

His mouth came to her ear, breath caressing. “He shouldna left you alone,” the man crowed. “Tracked him straight here. He shoulda known better. Been waiting for him, but you’re a delicious treat.”

Castle.

Beckett stepped into her attacker and chopped her arms down across the asshole’s elbow, breaking his hold. He grunted something and moved to strike her, but she rammed her forearm into his neck and had him choking.

She twisted-

But he tackled her before she could recover her feet, and they went back, her door popping open under the force of their brawl. She got a knee up and into the guy’s ribs, sinking solidly into some definite serious muscle. She kicked out again and felt her shoe catch his pelvis. He growled something foreign, Gaelic?, and then she was driven down to the floor, head bouncing.

His body on top of her. Fuck, no. Not good. Not good. She was not going down like this.

He was heavy and grinning over her. “He took one o’mine,” the man growled. “I’ll take his. Gonna fuck you with my knife, mo chuisle. Teach him for leaving what he loves defenseless to the likes of me.”

Her heart kicked up, the first fringe of panic tainting her fight. But she bucked hard, planting her feet in the bridge position and whipping up. She surprised him again with that move, and managed to flip him over, pile driving the asshole into her floor. 

“Bloody hell,” the man groaned. “He’s taught you that at least.” But the Irishman was rolling away as he snarled, a hand pressed to his ribs, trying to reclaim his feet. 

But now her way was clear.

Beckett lunged for the entry table, yanked open the drawer, spun around with the weapon in her hand. He roared something violently Gaelic and lunged for her, knife singing as it came clear of its sheath.

The blade touched her; she fired messily up into what was closest.

The man wheezed blood, frothing on his lips, but he came lurching towards her with death intent in eyes and that gaze fixed on her.

Beckett fired again.

This time the round was loud in her small apartment, booming through her head even as she watched the body fall. 

A dead man really did crumple.

It was such a neat hole, tidy. The one she’d put in his chest had created a spraying halo of blood but he hadn’t even slowed; he had kept coming, all that terrible intent in his eyes, and she had fired again and now- 

Beckett stood frozen in the cramped entry of her apartment, watched the blood form a seeping, round pool just beside the dead man’s head. 

She had fired right between the eyes, no hope for life-saving CPR, completely against NYPD protocol, fired on instinct and craven fear.

She had just killed a man.

\-----

Kate Beckett pushed the weapon into its leather holster, laid it on top of the entry table where she could get to - just in case. 

In case a dead man rises to walk again?

Her hands were shaking.

She had never - killed a man before. Shot a few, but-

There was all this blood. The kill shot between the eyes had no exit wound, just that neat hole, but his chest had welled up with it, a smeared mess pooling below his rib cage and onto her floor. Beckett swallowed and stepped closer.

The dead man was still there in the middle of her living room, but she crept back to the door and gently locked it. She’d gotten no call from the 12th asking after shots fired in her building, so she hoped her neighbors had done the stereotypical city-dweller thing and just turned up their televisions.

Beckett stepped around the dead man once more and slid slowly to the living room windows, nudging a slat of the wooden blinds to see to the street.

The night was still, the sidewalk deserted. The security lamp was blazing just at the corner, but the dead man didn’t seem to have any reinforcements.

Castle’s dead man, evidently. Secrets and shadows. A brutal thug who had wanted to send Richard a message.

Beckett studied the street, the rhythm and pattern of traffic and pedestrians, trying to see something that probably wasn’t there.

It wasn’t there. No one else was coming.

She stalked to the desktop computer and woke it up, hunched over the keyboard with her eyes on the body. He was short, barrel-chested, a face like a bulldog with thick, dark hair - raven’s wing - and his open eyes were emerald -clouded now.

She had taken his life. This bulldog man who had touched her in the subway, the strange brush of his body against hers, intrusive, violating - and he had known her spy. 

Beckett gave a grim smile and clicked on the video drive.

The bulldog had been trying to deliver a message to her spy - and it looked like she had him on video surveillance from the camera right outside her door. Message failed, asshole.

Beckett winced as she replayed the fight, his blindside tackle, her face slamming into the wood. And then the struggle went off-screen as she got pushed inside.

Nothing else. Fuck, that did her no good, really. She couldn’t prove it was a righteous kill, only that the bulldog had initiated it.

And now so much time had passed. She hadn’t called it in; she was fucking around on her computer and she wasn’t calling it in.

Beckett zipped the video back to the beginning and paused it on a somewhat clear shot. She took a screen cap of the man’s face and sent it through to her email. She would use Castle’s secure laptop to send him the photo for identification. 

And fast. If it wasn’t someone he needed to deal with himself, then she’d have to call the NYPD and report it. Fuck, another mark on her record. The delay was going to be hell to explain.

She needed to start thinking about it now, in case Castle couldn’t be reached. An excuse. The bulldog had been - and there had been others on the street? No, fuck, that would start a manhunt. He had attacked her.. and she had done nothing.

Beckett stood slowly from the desktop computer, her palms clammy now with the letdown of adrenaline. Her muscles quivered too. 

She glanced involuntarily towards the dead man. 

She would have to - she had to do something about this. 

Fuck, she had no idea what she was going to say to her sergeant if Castle didn’t know who this fucking asshole was.

\-----


	3. Chapter 3

Too late now.

It had been three hours and the blood was tacky, mostly dry now. She paced her living room; she was debating calling in sick. She didn’t know if it would be better to just show up like nothing had happened - all the while with a dead man in her home - or to take care of things here, keep close, keep everyone out.

Damn it. Castle hadn’t emailed back. Of course not; she couldn’t possibly rely on a covert spy for regular phone conversations. She was an idiot to have wasted the last three hours waiting on something that would never come.

Time to fucking deal with the dead man.

She had blown her chance to call her sergeant and report the firing of her weapon, but now that she began thinking it through, she wouldn’t have been able to do that anyway. The gun wasn’t registered. Couldn’t be.

She’d gotten it from a spy. It was such a beautiful weapon that she’d taken it without even considering the ramifications.

Other than the fact that she had wanted it. And he had made it - erotic. Just closing her fingers around the grip felt like taking him in her hand, all that power under her control.

She was an idiot. She had been seduced by a fucking gun and his secretive, paranoid shit and now look at her. She was fucked.

There was a dead man in her living room.

She couldn’t leave him on the floor. Her father would be here with the dog in the morning, handing him off to her again. So far the on-call stays with Jim Beckett had made something of a difference - for the dog and for her. When Cujo stayed with her father, it allowed her to keep from worrying about whether or not the dog could hold it another four hours, as well as giving her some confidence that her father would stay in the apartment to do his drinking.

That was a step up in Kate’s estimation. At least while she was working.

Fuck, her father would be here in twelve hours. She had to get this fucking guy off her floor at the very least. 

He was short but so broad around - had been anyway. What did you say about a dead man - he was technically still both short and broad, despite being dead, but short and broad on her living room floor meant more that he was heavy and an obstacle.

But he had to be gone, hidden. Had to be until Castle-

No, she couldn’t expect Castle to come save her from her own stupid, fucking indecision. She was the one who had fucked around instead of calling it in.

Bathroom. That way she could keep out Cujo too. And if she had to keep it for awhile - if it didn’t go well, then she could put the bulldog on ice.

No more fucking around, waiting for something to happen. No one else was coming; this man had been the only one.

\-----

Beckett stalked down her hallway and to the linen closet, opened it up with a jerk of her wrist. She scanned the shelves, selected a thick picnic blanket that had never been used - graduation gift from someone who had no idea who she was. It was quilted, a dark green lining, and the stitches would hold up under stress.

She came back to the living room and laid the blanket next to the body, head to foot, tucking the long end under him. She had to kneel on the floor, had to be close, so fucking close that she could smell where his bowels had released, his defecation soiling his pants in death.

Fuck, this was - revolting. Horrifying. The blood was gritty and stuck to her fingers; she felt her head swimming with the smell.

Well, she had killed him and now she had to deal with it.

Her mother had been murdered in their home, stabbed and then strangled and then shot, all that vicious and terrible violence centered on one person. And what Kate had done was a simple act, her gun in her hand, and this had been the result, the messy and awful and brutish result.

Her mother had been brutalized.

Kate sucked in a breath that didn’t want to come. 

She had almost become her mother.

Beckett closed her eyes against it and then she was ready. She crawled to the other side of the body and got her hands under his shoulder and hip, shoved hard to roll him over onto the quilt. 

Didn’t exactly work like she’d planned. The body scraped - it didn’t rock forward at all. She had to figure this out or otherwise she was going to wind up scooting it across her wood floors, smearing them with the man’s blood.

And - other fluids.

She shuddered, took a shallow breath.

A wedge. She needed a wedge. 

Beckett got off the floor and hunted through her living room, grabbed the unused phone book and came back with it, shoved it in high near the dead man’s shoulder and ribs, right at the edge of the blanket.

She blew a strand of hair out of her eyes and came back to the other side, got her hands in place, and pushed.

She grunted with the effort of balancing the awkward body, but the body started to roll, pitching face-forward in a sudden flop.

Good enough. He was on the quilt now.

Beckett scrambled up and grabbed the ends of the blanket, lifted the material straight up to roll the body towards the middle. When she had enough of a handhold, she dug her heels into the floor and started walking backwards, dragging the damn body on the blanket behind her.

Holy fucking hell, he was so damn heavy.

She was not her mother. She was alive. She was here; she had fought.

She had fought - just like Castle had told her, just like he had trained her, and for that, she owed him.

\-----

When it was done, Beckett found bleach and a sponge and she crawled on her hands and knees over the trail down her hallway, cleaning the stench and the stain. When she finally made it back to her living room, she sank back on her heels and stared at the smear of it, the great blot on her floor.

White vinegar. Set to the stain, press a clean cloth over the area for twenty-four hours.

She’d heard the crime scene cleaners once when she’d been down in the morgue, back when she had taken Dr Parish to lunch trying to sweeten her for a case. They’d connected, but that had been then.

White vinegar. At least she’d gained that.

Beckett dropped the sponge into the bucket and pushed up to her feet, staggering when her legs refused to hold. She caught her balance on the back of the couch, wincing at the throb in her head, and then she moved for the kitchen.

She had to search for it. She’d been over the pantry twice before she found the white vinegar in the cabinets under the sink. Once she found the bottle, she vaguely remembered her mother having kept vinegar under the sink with the trash bags and cleaning supplies. 

So of course, Kate had as well. 

She went back to the thickening stain in her living room and sank to her knees. The bottle had a safety cap that thwarted her, again and again, until her hands were shaking and her breath too fast and she thought she might cry.

No. No, she was alive and she was not going to cry.

Fuck this.

Beckett stumbled to her feet and moved for the entry, found the knife with its curved blade near the door. She grabbed it by the hilt, the rubber gritty from the dead man’s hand, and she went back for the bottle.

She hacked at the dense plastic until she managed to saw off the top of the bottle, and then she dumped the vinegar over onto the floor. The reek of cleaner was enough to knock her back.

Kate dropped the bottle without looking where it rolled, moved for her linen closet once more. She pulled out a patterned flat sheet from the bottom stack, and she came back to the vinegar-soaked blood stain.

For a second, she just stared at her floor.

And then Beckett came back to herself and laid the sheet over the stain, pressed the material into the vinegar.

She stood again, leaving it there, and returned to the dead man in the bathroom.

\-----

God.

Everything hurt.

Her throat was thick where the man’s fingers had gripped her. Her cheeks and forehead ached so fiercely she thought her skull might split in two.

She was bruised, shaky, sweating, and she had someone else’s blood soaking her shirt so thoroughly that she couldn’t seem to peel it away from her stomach.

She couldn’t manage to even unbutton her shirt.

Her fingers had stopped working, numb. She scrabbled at the placket, yanked, and finally got the shirt off, flinging it to the floor of her bathroom.

But she had a dead man askew in her bathtub. She was going to have to wash in the sink. 

Instead she sank down on the lid of the toilet, her elbows coming to the stained knees of her jeans, her hands dangling down. She had to breathe, just - take a second and get herself together. 

There was more work to be done.

Kate struggled back to her feet, popped the button off on her jeans, got her hands into the waistband. She had to work her hips back and forth to push the jeans down her legs. She couldn’t help seeing the dead man in the corner of her eye, his disgraceful tumble into the bathtub where she’d rolled him out of the blanket and over the side.

At least her gritty, blood-caked clothes were finally off. She felt better for shedding them.

Beckett left her jeans on the floor with her shirt and padded out into the hallway once more, heading for the kitchen. She pulled out all the ice trays and carried them back to the bathroom, started breaking them open over the body.

A few cubes of ice weren’t going to cut it. She needed five or six bags to keep him on ice for real, to keep the body from decomposing, losing any trace evidence or - fuck - starting to smell.

Shit. How long until... until she figured this out? Until she could get rid of him?

Beckett went back to the kitchen with the empty trays, refilled them with water from the kitchen sink, standing in her underwear on the cold tile. 

After a moment, she realized she was hearing something rhythmic, pulsing, something annoying and insistent.

Oh, fuck, that damn laptop. She had left it on her bed after she’d sent the email.

Kate wrenched open the freezer door, shoved the ice cube trays into their blank spot, and then hustled for her bedroom. She stumbled over the threshold, feet numb, found the laptop on the bed still open, waiting for a response she hadn’t thought was coming.

She collapsed to her knees before the bed, slammed her hand down on the keyboard. The laptop woke after a sluggish moment and she realized she had accepted a video chat.

“Castle,” she croaked.

“God, Kate.” He was in some kind of stonework space, pale and poorly-lit. But Castle himself was - different. Shadowed. He looked less. “Kate. Talk to me-”

“I’m okay,” she said shakily, kneeling beside the bed in only her underwear, skin streaked with another man’s blood. “I’m okay, it’s not my blood.”

“Kate.” He was cupping the screen in both hands as if he could touch her. “Baby, please. You’re bleeding.”

“No, it’s not mine. I had to - clean it up.”

“Kate, love.” His mouth twisted and he hunched towards her. “It is yours. It’s your blood, honey. Over your eyebrow - and your cheek is split. God. I’m - Kate.”

She lifted her hand and felt her cheek, the burn of her own rent skin. “I...” 

“Kate, honey, where is - where is he now? The man in the photo you sent, right outside your door. Did he do that-”

“He’s dead,” she said tonelessly.

“He’s - what?”

“I shot him. He’s dead in my - my bathtub.”

Castle stared at her, an emptiness in his face she didn’t understand. 

“I need to go,” she muttered. “I have to finish-”

“God, no, Kate. Please don’t-” 

“Don’t what?”

“Just, stay right here a second, baby, please. Fuck, he was there - he - you’ve killed him? You’re okay?”

“I have a fucking blood stain on my living room floor and I just need to - need to get this taken care of-”

“Fuck, I’m so sorry.” His head bowed, the bones of his face so prominent that they flared white in the bad lighting. “I brought him right to your door. Kate, I-”

The video went to snow, came back pixelated, his body jerky as the playback dropped frames. And then an explosion that rattled even Castle, so that she saw his body turn wildly away from the laptop’s camera. There was a moment where she couldn’t see him at all, and then he came back and his face filled the screen.

“I shouldn’t have called,” she husked. “I know you can’t-”

“No,” he growled, the audio was choppy. Something bad was happening there. “No. Don’t go. Love, you’re cut. Please, just-”

“I - handled it. It’s done. I just - didn’t know what to do at first. He said - said things about you, Rick, so I thought - but I shouldn’t have called-”

“No, baby, no, you did good. You did so good, love. Fucking hell, Kate, there’s so much blood-”

She glanced down her torso and saw the way it coated her skin, like something out of a damn Heart of Darkness movie. She was so tired.

“Oh, baby,” he said. His words were garbled and there was another burst of - was it gunfire?

She reached up and touched her aching cheek, winced when she realized that her skin had split open again; the blood was wet at her fingers. “Just the door,” she murmured.

His eyes were off-screen when he spoke. “I’m - shit - I’m trying. A flight, something,” he said then. “Just - hold tight, love. Okay?”

“No. No, don’t. Just - should I be doing something with him? For the Agency or - I don’t even know who he is. I just - killed him - I don’t even know his name.”

Castle rubbed both hands slowly down his face, staring at her. 

She knew she looked pretty fucking bad. “I need to clean up. And - my dad is going to be here soon - shit, I have to go-”

“Kate, sweetheart, look at me.”

She shifted her gaze to him.

“Honey, you just went up against an Irish terrorist and international arms dealer named Adrian Foley. A sadistic bastard who - who liked to get up close and personal, cut his enemies where it hurts most.” 

“Foley,” she mouthed, trying it out. Adrian Foley.

Castle was hunched so close that she could see how desperately blue his eyes were. “Foley. He’s been trying to kill me since Ireland, sweetheart. No one has - no one - has seen his face but me. And now you.”

“He’s dead,” she said, didn’t understand why he was looking at her like that.

“He’s dead,” Castle husked. “Sweetheart, you just took down number fifteen on the CIA’s Most Wanted Terrorists.”

She blinked.

“I’m coming to get you,” he said fiercely. “I will be there. Kate. I need you to just - not leave the apartment for now.”

“Where would I go?” she murmured.

“Kate, look at me. Tell me you understand.”

“I have to - get cleaned up,” she said numbly. 

He looked like he was going to say more, but she closed the lid of the laptop and the connection was severed.

Kate laid her uninjured cheek to the side of the bed and closed her eyes.

She felt really bad.

\-----


	4. Chapter 4

Beckett made herself get up from the floor and wash in the bathroom sink. She kept her eyes on the mirror, and she watched the blood disappear and reappear, swiped away by the washcloth and then welling up again over her eyebrow. 

Her face hurt. No wonder he had looked so freaked.

The dead man’s feet were up over the rim of the tub. Combat boots. One shoelace loop was long and trailed along the porcelain; it had a tight knot in the lace like he couldn’t be bothered to tie them correctly. 

She turned her eyes back to the bathroom mirror.

The blood was welling up again.

She wiped it away.

One of the CIA’s Most Wanted terrorists had followed her home on the subway, had - played with her - and she had killed him.

Her cheek ached so badly from where her face had slammed into the door, but crying made it worse.

She should have called her sergeant. She had panicked, her first fatal shooting; she had panicked and holed up and now she had to deal with this. She needed to deal with it. She had to dump ice in the tub and finish cleaning everything up and make sure the blood was wiped down with bleach in her hall.

Beckett turned back to the bathtub, eyed the dead man. Castle had told her once that he had gotten the scar across his collarbone at the edge of a knife - the first time he’d been tracking Foley.

And now Foley had tried to do the same to her; the knife in his hand had been his intent. He had touched her in the subway.

She was not sorry he was dead.

Beckett turned back to the sink and rinsed out the washcloth, slowly, watching the pink circle down the drain. She had panicked and called Castle, of all people, and now he was heading this way but fucking hell, this was her mess. She should have called her sergeant. Let the CIA deal with the official fallout, let his damn father clean it up.

Fucking hell, she had called Castle, and Castle was coming, and his father was going to fucking lose it. 

What mission had she just ruined for a damn dead body? Whose cover had she blown, who was now in mortal peril because Kate Beckett couldn’t get her shit together?

Damn it.

Fuck. Fuck. 

“Fuck.”

She bowed her head, eyes closed, gripping the sink with white knuckles, and then her knees gave way, slowly, disgraceful, just collapsing inward until she was on the floor, barely hanging on to the bowl of the sink.

She was so far past exhausted and she had made wrong decisions at every turn.

“Fuck,” she moaned, pressing her forehead to the porcelain.

She had a dead man in her bath tub. Castle was abandoning his mission.

His father would be-

Oh, God. She had to - fix this. She’d coerced Castle into ditching his mission and she had to somehow stop him. She had no number for John Black, of course not; they were kept carefully apart. There was a strange ceasefire where Black didn’t show up at her apartment any longer, and she didn’t make disparaging remarks, and Castle was silent as the grave. His therapist guy, the one who had gotten her reinstated, King, she knew his number.

She was supposed to see him next month; subconsciously, she’d been planning on ditching the appointment. But she could call King and have him get in touch with Black and-

And what? Calling his daddy for help just like Castle always did? No. Fuck that. 

Not happening. Because John Black would send his local lackey, Deleware, and it would be that asshole at her door and no fucking way. No.

She could handle this. She would text Castle to chill out; she was fine, she had a plan. 

She didn’t have a plan. She needed that plan because she was not causing a fucking international incident.

Foley was CIA’s Most Wanted; if she fucking erased the physical evidence like she knew how to do from training, then no one was going too look closely. Plus the CIA would take custody of the case anyway, keep a lid on it. If her name ever did come up, there were a few people who would quietly sweep it under the rug. Black himself might do that just to keep his son clear of the fallout.

It was fine. It was going to be fine. She would - find a way to transport the dead man. The medical examiner’s van - she knew where Lanie Parish left the keys. Or a storage van. A box; she could get a box up here. She’d figure this out. 

She wasn’t fucked yet.

Beckett rose to her feet, pressed her hands to her eyes and then back through her hair, staring at herself in the mirror. Time to do this.

The door buzzed. Not the building’s security door, no. Her front door.

Beckett froze.

It buzzed again.

Had her father come early with Cujo? There was no way Castle - though he might have sent someone. He was like that.

She padded out barefoot, her heart in her throat, and stepped carefully to the peephole to look out.

An eyeball was looking back.

She jumped, crashing back into the wall, ricocheting off of it. Still unable to catch her breath, she went back to the peephole, glanced outside. The face resolved past the staring, peering eye and her worst nightmares coalesced.

Deleware was outside her apartment door.

“Beckett. I know you’re in there.”

She pressed her hand over her mouth to quell the noise, took a step back.

“Beeeeckett,” he called through the door. “Kate.”

She swallowed back the bile that rose in her throat.

“Kate. You need to let me in. Shouldn’t do this out here.”

She didn’t move.

“Castle sent me. He told me to come here and help you out with a problem. You do have a problem, don’t you?”

No. Never in a million years would Castle call Deleware for his help. Not after the things Deleware had said to her when he’d gotten out of jail that night. No. Not after the way Castle had taken him down.

“Kate.”

No.

She reached for the entry table and once more, once again today, opened the little drawer and removed her weapon.

She kept her finger at the trigger guard and sank down against the door, putting her back to it, her head tilted against the wood, her eyes closed, listening to Deleware softly call her name.

“Kate. I just want to talk.”

She clasped the gun on her raised knees, barrel pointing to the ceiling.

“Kate, we just want to know what’s happened. Castle has gone AWOL and it’s because of you, isn’t it?”

She clenched her teeth.

“John Black isn’t happy.”

Fuck.

\-----

Deleware ghosted her hallway for three hours before the absolute silence made her realize that he’d gone.

She thought she could still hear him calling her name through the wooden door, but he wasn’t there. Beckett turned off the security system, afraid that Black had used it somehow, wiped her email inbox but she knew that wasn’t a deterrent to someone with resources.

The email she’d sent to Castle had been the account he’d created for them, and while she didn’t think his father would know how to get in, or even that it existed, she wouldn’t put it past him.

Fuck, she’d sent Castle dirty photos on that damn ‘secure’ email. Oh, fuck, that time she’d uploaded the images from their weekend at his apartment in Harlem and the subject line next time without the whipped cream.

She still heard her name floating in the air, intimate, sibilant, provoking.

Beckett moved to the office window, looked out solemnly over the street, the gun at her thigh. Evening had a pink cast to the sky, the buildings glowed with unnatural light. It was never truly black outside, never the eternity of stars overhead, just this washed out pale cast to the world, like no one could quite face the horrors of the night.

She had a dead man in her bathtub.

She was going to have to deal with it.

Kate slipped away from the window and went looking for her phone, finally found it in the bathroom, perched on the edge of the sink. When she moved to pick it up, she realized she still had the gun in her hand, the beautiful Wilson Ultralight with its grip that felt like it had been made for her.

The gun Castle had dragged across her body, circling her breasts, before he’d nestled it between her legs, teasing the dark edge of her soul.

She couldn’t let go of the weapon. It was affixed to her deeper than just having it in her hand; grafted on her very being.

Think of it as an extension of me.

She let out a long breath and pulled up her contacts. For him, she had to get this handled. He couldn’t be leaving his damn mission just because she’d been momentarily overwhelmed.

Beckett called King. It rang and rang, the sound of it echoing endlessly. She thought King would know how to contact Castle, get him back to his job, but he’d also probably know just what was the damn protocol here. She’d killed a terrorist. Someone would-

Oh, fuck. Would John Black have the therapist’s personal cell phone monitored?

Shit, of course he would.

Beckett snapped closed the phone, pounded the end of it into her forehead with a curse. Damn it. 

She had killed Adrian Foley, this man in her bathtub, and his blood was still, literally, on her hands. She couldn’t get the stain of it out from the hangnail on her thumb, and now she was remembering the blood-borne pathogens training video they’d had to watch just a few months ago. She was reliving the violent smash of her face into the door.

Her whole body ached so badly she was having trouble keeping her thoughts on track.

Dr King was out of reach; she couldn’t bring him into this and confirm to Black exactly how far Beckett had gotten into the CIA world. Castle kept saying, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but he still told her. 

So Beckett went back to the living room, phone still in her hand, placed it beside the computer. There would have to be a way to scrub the hard drive, get the video off as well as the rest of it. She didn’t know. Castle knew that kind of thing.

She should never have called him.

This was her kill, and it had been clean until she panicked and shut down. And now it was messy and complicated and she was fucking everything up even still.

Was Deleware still in the building?

She couldn’t leave; she was caged in her apartment with dead Foley and the slow-creeping madness of the tell-tale heart.

She paused, certain she could still hear Deleware. She moved softly to the front door and placed her hand on the wood, took a breath for courage.

She leaned in and looked through the peephole, staring at empty hallway for a long, long time, trying to convince herself it was only her overworked imagination.

And then at the far left of the fishbowl, the faint blurred edge of a form.

Deleware.

He was still here.

Of course he was. Of course.

She shivered and sank to the floor in front of her door, the gun still gripped in her sweat-slicked palm. 

Deleware. Out there. The cameras were disengaged; she was certain of that. Was she? Yes, yes, don’t get crazy; she knew she had gone over there and taken them offline. Cleaned her email. She had to scrub that damn hard drive. 

She leaned her aching head back against the door. The bones of her face were like jagged shards under her skin. Even closing her eyes didn’t help; she could feel the pulse of her heart through her head.

This had all gone so very badly.

And fuck it all, now she was crying.

\-----

Beckett woke to the thud against her front door and the violent shove of her body. She moaned and tried to move, her legs instinctively pressing back, but a voice was calling her name.

Insistent. Panicked.

“Kate. Open the door. Kate, baby, just - please - open the door for me, love. Kate. At least pick up the phone, please-”

She scrambled forward and the door swung wildly open, Castle falling in on top of her, catching himself at the last second, catching her.

“Kate,” he husked.

She was trapped, half-sitting, one leg caught under his weight, one of his elbows propping him up and his chest against hers. She’d been pressed back so that she was leaning back on her hands, her arms shaking with the weight of them both. “Rick-”

Suddenly he was enveloping her, his arms strong bands around her torso, his face buried in her neck, his width and solidness so real that she found herself crawling forward into him, seeking more, her legs twining around his hips.

“I watched the video,” he croaked out. “God. Nothing broken? Am I hurting you-”

“No.” She’d be trembling if he wasn’t holding her so tightly. She couldn’t seem to let go. “No, just bruised.”

His palm - so wide, so huge - traveled over the side of her face where she’d pressed against him, his fingers gentle. “Your skin feels hot. Swollen?”

“I - don’t know.”

“Think so,” he whispered. “Might have cracked something, sweetheart.”

“No, I’m okay. Just - aches.” Even her very breath ached.

“God, I’m so sorry. I thought I was careful. I’ve tried to be so damn careful-”

“I’m okay,” she repeated. Numbness had snowed her in, she felt heavy and tired. She wanted to sleep. “But can we get off the floor?”

He immediately had her up, so swift the transition the she didn’t even feel it, her feet under her and his body holding hers up, her head swimming with the abrupt change.

Castle. He was strong arms and strong thighs, fingers roving over her, checking her for himself.

“You need some ice for that,” he said. “Let me get a look at you and then - what did you do with the body?”

He was staring around her place, shock flickering in his steeled eyes. She took a swaying step away from him, but his arms tightened and drew her back.

“I took care of it,” she mumbled. Her head hurt really badly all of the sudden, her cheekbones felt like she’d been smashed face-first into a door. 

Because she had been. And then he had tried to strangle her. And then the knife had come out.

“He tried to kill me,” she husked.

“Kate,” he whispered, drawing his hands up to cradle her face. 

Even that hurt, the careful cupping of her jaw, the light touch of thumbs below her eyes. His hands were like great animal paws, but he drew her against him with the softest, easiest embrace.

“Please sit down,” he murmured.

“I’m okay.”

“Of course you are. You’ve got blood on your neck, your face, crusted in your hair. Kate, let’s go to the bathroom and clean-”

“Can’t. He’s in my tub.”

Castle blinked. His mouth opened and closed again. 

“I couldn’t leave him on the floor.”

“No, no,” he agreed softly. “You’re right. The tub. That’s - clever, love.” Castle skimmed his hand down her arm and tugged on her wrist, angled her towards the couch. She didn’t know why she went, only that the pulse of heat in her face was making it difficult to think.

Castle had known the guy in her bath tub. They had been - sworn enemies. Nemesis. She had been forced to shoot him; she had never fatally shot anyone - killed anyone. She had killed him.

“Wait,” she murmured, sinking down onto the couch. “You said video. How’d you get the video?”

Castle sank before her, brushing his fingertips over the ridge of her eyebrow. “It was on the dropbox; it dumps there automatically.”

“A drive online.” She slowly pulled her feet up onto the cushions, toed off her shoes, Castle wriggling them over her heels to help. “Must be how he got it, how he knew.”

“He? Who is he?” Castle had his fingers around her ankles, squeezing.

“I... guess Black. Deleware has been here.”

Castle sucked in a breath, face turning murderous just like that. “I’m going to fucking kill him.” He started to stand.

Kate pitched forward, snagging him around the neck, stilling his killing instinct. “I thought you were getting me ice,” she husked.

He faltered, touched his forehead to hers. “Ice... Kate.”

“You’re not getting me ice?”

“I - yes,” he growled. “Where the fuck is that bastard, Del-”

“Get me some ice,” she whispered. “My cheeks hurt.”

Castle grunted and stood up, untangling her arm from his neck and kissing her knuckles. He left her on the couch and she sank back against the cushions, closing her eyes against the pulsing ache.

Her teeth hurt. Her jaw. Both cheeks were so bruised she could barely move her lips to talk. There was a gash on her forehead that kept opening up. Her left ribs were pinching her breath. She wanted to sleep.

She gasped when his fingers trailed wetly along her forehead; her eyes sprang open. Castle eased the gel pack down and touched the cold end to her cheek, making her shudder.

“Sorry, baby. Gotta leave it on for at least twenty, then off again.”

“Need a dish rag or wash cloth to keep it off my skin - that burns.”

“Okay, hang on. Hold this, love.”

She reached up and used the back of the couch to help steady her arm, winced as she touched her face to the gel pack. It burned, but numbness began to sink in slowly.

Castle came back with a wash cloth after a few seconds, whistling softly at her and shaking his head. “Damn, Kate. He really is in the bathtub.”

She frowned but it fucking hurt; she had to school her features and relax her muscles. Castle sank down to the cushion beside her hip and leaned in, took the gel pack from her fingers to wrap it in the washcloth. He reapplied the ice himself, his other hand brushing the hair off her face.

“Adrian Foley,” he murmured, his eyes roving over her face. “Kate. God, it kills me, you going up against him alone. So fucking glad you fight like a hellcat, you never give in. You okay?”

“I’m...” What did he mean? She was battered. “Hurts to talk.”

“You don’t have to talk. Here, come here.” He was drawing the ice away, his hand coming around her arm and shifting her. Before she quite knew it, she was being managed, arranged against him with his arm around her and her body half-reclined, his other hand cradling the ice against her cheek.

She closed her eyes, not entirely sure she should, but Castle was like a heating blanket at her side, drugging.

“We’ll deal with the body,” he murmured into the top of her head. “It’ll all be taken care of. And I’m gonna make damn sure it goes down in the official CIA report that Kate Beckett killed Adrian Foley, badass and single-handedly putting a bullet between the eyes of a terrorist.”

Her stomach churned and she pressed her hand to her mouth to stop it, bones aching. Castle froze, barely breathing, and she swallowed fast to keep from throwing up.

“Oh fuck,” he whispered.

She was going to be sick.

“Oh, damn. Oh, Kate, love. This was your first.”

She shoved off the couch and raced for the bathroom, vomited over the sink with a wretched violence, the dead man at her back.

\-----


	5. Chapter 5

He was gentle and so understanding it made her miserable, but he cleaned up everything and made her go back to the couch with the gel pack against her face. She fell asleep without meaning to and woke disoriented, darkness creeping through her bedroom, her body tucked under the sheets.

Castle was gone; he’d carried her to bed and then left.

She rolled slowly to her side and tried to lay her head against the pillow but every angle hurt. The ache was dull at first, but it built until it had culminated in a calamitous roar in her skull. She adjusted her arm, the angle, her pillow, her nose, but it was no use. She gave up and rolled to her back, feeling exposed.

She got out of bed slowly, got to her feet with everything out of alignment. Something was disjointed, and she didn’t know what, but it was wrong. Everything was wrong.

Beckett shuffled painfully to the bedroom door and opened it to find hooded men in her hallway.

“Fuck-” she croaked, stumbling back.

“Beckett.” Castle was dropping the dead man and pushing through the knot of strong, blank-eyed men, coming towards her with that cast to his eyes - like flint - that she had begun to associate with death.

“Rick,” she murmured, allowing him to block her view with the breadth of his shoulders. He was close, too close, but he wasn’t touching her.

No displays of affection before his team - this - these strangers. 

“You need to turn around and go back inside,” he said softly. 

Her eyes shifted past him, all of their own accord, and Castle stepped in once more, crowding her back to the bedroom. He wasn’t blocking her view; he was blocking her from view.

Protecting her.

“Beckett. You can’t be out here while we do this.”

“Right,” she scraped out, closing her eyes a moment. She was supposed to be a damn officer of the law. And now...

This was it? The dead man who had tried to smash in her skull was just going to be carried out of her apartment and disappear and there would be nothing. No inquiry, no review, no censure, just silence. The men in her apartment weren’t even waiting on Castle; she could hear them making careful movements down the hall towards the front door with the body between them in a blue bag.

“I have to come,” she husked, hating herself. Hating him. Bleakly resigned to it. “I need to come. I shot him.”

“Kate-”

“No,” she forced out, eyes flaring open. She straightened up, her spine cracking back into place, her pelvis somehow torqued back into alignment now that she was standing tall, against him. “No, I’m going. Wherever it is you’re taking him - putting him-”

“We’re burning it.”

“Then I have to be there,” she said. She was still in her work clothes, dress pants and a badly wrinkled shell, but she turned for her closet, for shoes and a sweatshirt. “I’m going. I killed him - I’m going.”

Castle said nothing and she wouldn’t give him the chance to talk her out of this. She had shot this man; she had used an unregistered weapon and now there were consequences and she wasn’t paying them. She wouldn’t be paying them, either.

She was letting a team of his men carry her problem right out of her apartment like it had never happened.

It had happened. This was her life. 

Castle had brought a lot of shit home with him, but she had chosen this. She kept choosing it, and there had to be - consequences. There was a price to pay for the life she led with him and she was afraid that if she kept shoving it off, postponing her reckoning for another day, when that day came, she’d be completely unprepared for it.

It would catch her off guard, judgment would be swift and final and she would never stand a chance.

“Kate.”

She ignored him, ripping off the blouse to grab a sweatshirt and pull it on over her head, her hair trapped in her haste. She shoved her feet into boots, zipped them up, and when she stood again, the blood rushed painfully in her cheeks, her temples, made her movements clumsy.

Castle caught her by the arms. He skimmed his fingers back to her neck and gently tugged the hair out from under the sweatshirt. “There will be no names spoken aloud,” he murmured. “Don’t ask questions. Follow my direction without comment.”

She swallowed, but she nodded affirmation. She wasn’t good about following without comment.

Unless he was fucking her.

Castle was smirking when she met his eyes again; he knew exactly what she was thinking.

“The story is you’re an inside agent,” he said softly. “This is a recovery operation to keep your cover intact. Say nothing, sweetheart. It’s important no one know you.”

She only looked at him. Words had never been very forthcoming for her; she wouldn’t have trouble riding lonely in a van somewhere to a dump site - or whatever the hell it was they were doing here.

“That’s my girl,” he murmured. His kiss was cool and light against her cheek and it fucking hurt. 

It really hurt.

“Stay at my back. We’re carrying it out of here.”

It. It. 

“Don’t you mean him?”

Castle gave her a look over his shoulder, that dead look. “No. I mean it. Keep your mouth shut, Beckett. You’re gonna get made.”

She shut her mouth and followed him out of the bedroom.

\-----

The men all looked alike in their masks; they all had blank and nothing eyes, the kind that were so easily forgettable. Unlike Rick’s eyes, which she would know anywhere, and his mouth, which had that peculiar slant to it. And of course, if they opened their mouths, she might know.

Which they wouldn’t, of course.

She found herself trying to differentiate men anyway. One was at Castle’s shoulder, silent, but the two of them moved in sync. 

She wondered if that was Eastman. And if so, why he remained masked like the others. He didn’t pay her any more attention than the others but she sensed him aware and calculating in a way that never surfaced in his eyes.

She thought he was Eastman. But she wouldn’t ask.

They were crowded into the back of an electrician’s van, according to the painted decal on the grey panel side. The dead man was in a bright blue body bag, shoved unceremoniously towards the front in a kind of caged area behind the driver. Electrician’s tools - mostly cable and complicated fuse boxes - were piled on top of him.

She felt the headache pounding in her cheekbones and the untreated gash on her face like a flaming sword had cleaved in her skull. It wasn’t pleasant to ride uncomfortably close to so many solid, unmovable bodies, but Castle was at her left and he braced her when they went over the worst of the potholes.

Surreptitiously, of course. His fingers stayed hooked into the back of her pants, and she found herself listing towards him alarmingly.

She absolutely could not do that. Protect her cover.

She was beginning to suspect that Castle had also treated the gash. And cleaned the blood from her face and neck, her hands. She’d been unconscious with exhaustion, but she thought she remembered surfacing once when the sting of cleaning the wound had roused her.

He had done a lot.

They were heading out of the city, into New Jersey in the darkness, a moderate pace. She hadn’t been expecting a place outside New York, though when she stopped to think, she had no idea what she had been expecting. A special warehouse on the river where a clandestine meeting and an exchange of money would have the body seen to: burned in a creamtorium, the ashes later disposed of in the water.

The drive seemed interminable. Castle’s grip on her jeans became a fist in the back of her sweatshirt, holding her upright as she swayed. Not quite as surreptitious now. She was going to fall out on the floor if she couldn’t get it together.

She turned her head and glanced at him, almost risked opening her mouth to ask, where are we going? But the man she thought was Eastman caught her eye and shook his head, very subtly, no.

She felt stung, for no reason she could understand, and she sank back against the metal side of the van, her heart pounding at the rebuke.

Keep your mouth shut, Beckett. You’re gonna get made.

She would. Her ignorance would tell on her. She’d get made and ruin it for him, whatever deal he’d had to engineer, whatever he’d told his CIA friends (did Castle have friends? she’d never heard of them) to make this fly. 

She knew from Castle himself that the CIA was very regimented. They all followed orders without question, much like the armed services, not looking to the right or left, not asking questions. No one ever knew the whole picture, he only knew his one part to play, his role to fulfill.

That would drive her crazy, never knowing the end results, not seeing the consequences, for good or ill. She was driven by a superseding need for closure, and professionally, she needed to make that happen on a daily basis. It was the point of her existence; it was her mission in life - serve justice for all the damn injustice.

She wasn’t cut out to be another drone. 

Of course, that meant she couldn’t understand how Castle did this at all. He wasn’t a drone; he would never allow himself to be wound up and let go like an automaton. How in the world did he do this every day? How had a man with his charisma and force of presence, with his bullying determination, ever survived the CIA?

He was a man of certainties with a kind of little boy innocence in those certainties. He was constantly infuriating, perpetually touching things, never still, always demanded his own way. There was no arguing with him when he thought he was right. Like tonight, coming into her apartment and taking over, arranging everything, sending her to bed like a child.

Dealing with the dead man she had shot.

She wished it was just the two of them, she and Castle alone. She had things she needed to understand - there was a story here she was missing - but surrounded by his CIA cohorts, she couldn’t ask those questions.

Adrian Foley had toyed with her; he had wanted to make her hurt. It had been fucking personal.

She had thought, for a moment when she was fighting for her life, that Foley intended much more than killing her. That extra shot of adrenaline and fear had probably been the thing to save her life, pushing her past her limits and responding instinctively with the training Castle had been drilling into her.

She still could feel that touch on the subway, the intention in it, the malice.

And the bones in her face throbbed with every bump in the road.

She wanted to get this over with.

She wanted to watch Foley burn.

\-----

The men carried the body into the dark.

They had stopped at a gravel road overlooking an old slag pit, unmined for decades, and Beckett jumped out of the back of the van to follow.

And promptly crumpled to her knees. 

Or she would have - had Castle not caught her by the arm and hauled her right up to her feet again.

“Thanks,” she breathed. They were at the back of the procession, just the two of them, and Castle gripped her sweatshirt and propelled her forward, all without a word.

She found her feet again, her balance kicking in despite the way her face ached, and Castle let go of her. She managed the gradual incline of gravel and weeds that led down to the slag pit, but once she got there, the sides were so fucking steep. And no helpful ladder or anything, no, of course not.

Kate sighed and Castle came to stand with her. She watched the men picking their way down the steep layers that made up the slag pit, the body swaying in its bright blue bag between them.

She had to be there.

“You could stay up here-”

Beckett took a step down the side and immediately her foot was sliding out from under her. Castle caught her again, growling something furious in her ear, but she shut down, ignored him.

She had to be down there. She had shot him. It was her kill.

“Fine, Beckett. Fine. Just let me fucking help.”

“Can’t,” she croaked. “The cover-”

“Fuck the cover-”

“No-”

“I’m a fucking terrible handler if I let my charge fall down into a fucking hole.”

She gritted her teeth and took a breath, finally turned her head to him. “Don’t let me stand in your way-”

“Stop being a bitch, Kate. You shot a man; you killed him. He was a very bad man. Do you understand? He was a fucking enemy of the state, but more than that, he was a personal enemy of mine. He wanted to hurt you.”

She ignored the break in his voice. “I’m not being a bitch,” she shot back. “I’m trying to get down the side of this fucking hole without ruining your damn reputation with your fucking crew-”

He gripped her hard and yanked her back into him. “They’re not my crew, Beckett. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t know these fucking men - other than one of them - and he’s covering my back so that I can cover yours-”

“I don’t want you covering my fucking back. I want you to do your job-”

“But you did my job,” he hissed back. “Kate. You did my job. You got this guy. I fucking led him to your doorstep, and I will never forgive myself for that. So the very fucking least I can do is give you whatever it is you need to get closure after you did my fucking job.”

She blinked, staring at all his swirling, righteous anger - the icy control of his face and the burning heat of his eyes - and she knew that she was the only person who ever saw him like this.

He gave himself to her, no one else, and that meant she got the nasty side of him too - the strangers attacking her in her own apartment, and the wild dog he’d left her to train alone, and the coming and going at all times without warning. 

She got that, but she got this too. The man holding her up before a slag pit who was going to get her down come hell or high water, the man who was fucking impressed by her but also exasperated as fuck, the man who brought her a dog because he couldn’t stay.

Kate wanted to touch him. She wanted the story about Adrian Foley. She wanted to kiss him, but this wasn’t his crew.

“You don’t know them?” she murmured, her eyes cast down to the side of the slag pit to the men. Eastman, she was sure, was the one he knew. “If you don’t know them, then where did they come from?”

“My father,” he gritted out. 

Oh. No wonder he was uptight. After the fuck-up with the boat and the Somali pirates capturing him, Castle was still wary of leaning on his father.

“Now let me cover your back, Kate. Your turn is up; it’s mine now.”

She stared down the slag pit towards the men, the men and that blue flag of a body bag, and then she lifted her hand and gripped Castle’s arm. 

He wasn’t wearing a jacket, just a t-shirt. The fierce flex of his bicep made her insides flutter, but she ignored it.

Castle began to lead her down the slag.

\-----


	6. Chapter 6

Steelmaking, apparently, was fiery, hot, and - looking at the blast furnace before them - fucking complicated. It required a metallurgy that seemed more angry and aggressive than Beckett had ever expected, but it made the perfect place to utterly destroy a body.

The blast furnace was a massive edifice erected into the side of the slag pit, carved out and towering nearly six stories high, laced with rigging, ladders, and scaffolding. As Beckett traced her eyes over the complex system, she finally began to make sense of all that damn metal.

Coke - a coal product - was continuously fed into a silo-sized main furnace while iron ore, limestone sinter, dolomite, and scrap were pushed up a moving elevator into the top of the stack. This mixture came together in the cone furnace while hot air - about 1200 Celsius, according to the demarcation on the dial readouts - was blasted through the bottom to keep the chemical process moving.

Slag runoff poured out into the pit in which they stood, the same pit where, years ago, workers had mined the very ore and limestone it had taken to feed the plant. The cowper stoves for the hot blast, which kept the air boiling and moving through the cone, were grimy, up-ended submarines behind the cone.

It was serious industry and hot sweat and dust-grime. It was forcing the ground to give up its goods and shaping something impenetrable and lasting.

And despite the body they were here to burn, it was working on her like foreplay.

It was just that Castle was taking charge and pushing her around, and Beckett was shoving back and demanding, and the heat was their fire and slag. Made her frustrated and aroused and she had just killed a man with the gun he had fucked her with when he had given it to her - think of this as an extension of me - and she had felt him there with her, a strength she had needed in that exact moment, flowing through her, and she had shot to kill, no question.

“Come on,” he said. He was leading her towards the cone.

Up close, she saw that the blast furnace was rusted in its joints, every bolt and fitting had holes and pieces flaking off, the scaffolding had collapsed like a sagging jaw, and the ladders were crooked. 

Unused. Abandoned. A great beast of a machine left to lay down and die, the area so decimated that even nature couldn’t reclaim it.

Beckett followed Castle to the chute where slag by-product had flowed out from the cone, and there the men had stopped, the body bag between them. The guy she thought must be Eastman was saying something in a low voice, but Castle stepped up.

“No,” he said shortly. “She does it.”

Beckett straightened her spine, jerked forward at Castle’s gesture. The slag chute had partially collapsed away from the cone; the door between the chute and cone was closed and sealed, but it looked fragile, easy to pry open.

“Get that open; help us shove it in.”

She nodded, remembering to keep her mouth shut, moved for the sealed slag door. It was a tighter fit than she’d expected, and she had to prop her hip against the slag chute, a wide metal tube that creaked when she leaned against it.

Beckett kicked at it twice before it began to move, and after some more shoving, it finally fell from the cone with a crash.

She stepped into the narrow space left to her and wrapped her arm through the handle of the slag door. It was the kind of handle she expected to find in a submarine or space shuttle, and it had been sealed tight before the blast furnace had been abandoned to prevent slag or chemical run-off from leaking out of the cone and into the ground.

The men were waiting on her, though they were respectful in their silence. She didn’t feel any judgment coming from them, only expectancy and a job that needed to be completed. Beckett wrenched hard and felt her obliques straining, her shoulders flaring hotly with pain, and she winced as it finally gave way.

She got the wheel turned and the slag door groaned hard as it came, something foul bursting out with the stale air. Beckett ducked back, coughing as a cloud of it hit her, and felt Castle’s fingers at her elbow, guiding her out of the way.

“It’s just trapped air; turns gaseous. Breathe.”

She gulped her breaths, eyes burning with whatever that had been, but Castle had let go to organize the men. She recovered quickly, got herself together, came to the body bag between Castle and the guy she thought was Eastman. 

“Lay hands,” Castle barked.

As one, they gripped the blue sides of the body bag, some with looped handles, some without. Beckett had a handle and she felt its abrasive material against her palm, felt the weight of the man inside.

The dead man she had killed because he had come for her. Come to hurt Castle by hurting her.

“One.” 

She was glad he was dead.

“Two.” 

There was a story she didn’t know, but she had mastered a decades-old rivalry and beaten him.

“Three.”

They heaved, carrying the body of Adrian Foley up to the slag chute door and into the hole, manhandling it over the rim and finally down into the cone of the blast furnace.

The body disappeared just like that.

“Foxtrot, you wait right here,” Castle directed. “The agent will light it; I’ll hand it off to you.”

Light it-?

Castle pulled a flare out from a bag at another man’s feet; she hadn’t noticed it, so focused on that blue body bag that had now disappeared. He handed her a common Zippo lighter and she flipped open the top, watched Castle as he broke open the flare.

It wasn’t a flare; it was something else. It looked an awful lot like a fucking stick of dynamite. She lifted her eyebrow at him but he wasn’t looking at her.

“Fall back,” he called out.

Holy shit.

The rest of the men started heading for the slope of the slag pit, leaving her, Castle, and Foxtrot in one place.

Castle had been serious when he said he didn’t know them. Using military letter designations for names. The rest of the men hadn’t even stuck around to make sure they got out of here cleanly.

“Light it up, Agent.”

She flicked her thumb over the Zippo wheel and it creaked, didn’t light. Her guts churned but she tried it again and now it sparked, now the flame danced high and bright in the darkness.

She caught her breath.

Castle tilted the stick to her and she touched the flame to the end of it, watched it sizzle as he handed it off to her and took the lighter.

“Go, go, go,” he barked sharply. She chucked the stick into the open hole in the side of the cone, and got to stay just long enough to watch it disappear before she had Castle dragging her back, Foxtrot gripping her other elbow.

They jogged to the side of the slag pit, her movements rough and unsteady, Castle with a tight grip, Foxtrot on the other side. She hit the base of the slope and she took the first step up the side, felt the gradient sliding under her foot.

She grunted, feeling her body suddenly falling backward, but Foxtrot caught her, and between him and Castle, they propelled her up the side.

The explosion shook the pit like the voice of God, throwing them to their knees, and she felt the fierce aching flame at her back, hungry and hot.

Foxtrot was breathing hard but almost - laughing? Laughing. He was thrilled, giddy, and Beckett found that she had that same near-hysterical reaction.

At her other side, Castle hauled her to the top and dragged her to stand with him. Her heart was thundering, her breaths hot and panting, and when she looked up at him, Castle had that same wild ferocity in his eyes.

They had done it like this on purpose.

She had needed the closure, yes, but she had needed the risk and danger, the exposure and the violence too. And Castle had recognized that in her, and brought her here with him, to this place, given her this specific job.

He had seen it in her, this need, and he was doing what he could to assuage it.

His fingers gripped her biceps. “Back to the van,” he husked.

She nodded, her mouth shut, and followed him.

\-----

She needed less support on the drive back, but Castle had subtly shifted his leg in front of hers so that her foot hooked behind his ankle. It helped quite a lot and she let him, not wanting to open her mouth and make it worse.

Her fingertips were tingling, her lips. She had to keep telling herself it wasn’t the damn gas she’d accidentally inhaled, that it wasn’t whatever the fallout had been from the explosion inside the blast furnace. Honestly, it was probably just the letdown after her adrenaline rush of a night.

It was probably Castle’s shoulder brushing hers and the certainty that he was here. The tantalizing heat of his body against hers. The rumble of his voice as he gave terse replies to the other man’s questions.

Fuck, he was a damn attractive man. It was a Pavlovian response these days; he showed up and she got wet. This was getting ridiculous. She had to get her shit together. She was already feeling buzzed from the smash to the face, and she had a feeling there was a concussion somewhere in there, but she didn’t want to look bad in front of these guys, ruin his hard-won reputation.

She thought the van was taking a circuitous route home, though she couldn’t be sure since the sides were paneled over and she could barely see through the tinted back windows. She felt the turns in her body, felt the way it swayed with the rush of interstate travel and then slowed to surface roads. Back and forth, on and off the highway.

She didn’t even look at him; he wouldn’t speak to her anyway. Or he shouldn’t, and he might if she asked something stupid, and she needed to not be that.

He had already aborted his mission for her, for this damn inconvenient shooting, and she was not going to fuck up anything else for him.

When she felt the van exit and then come to a crawling stop, she knew they were back in the city, stuck in the usual traffic, and she could relax a little. Her shoulder blades came back against the side of the van and she let out a breath.

Her face throbbed. Hell.

The guy she thought might be Eastman started going down the line, handing out what looked to be credit cards, some kind of identification? Or maybe payment. She had no idea, but they all tucked their cards into pockets or belts, hidden compartments in their boots or inside a holster, the first hints of affinity she’d seen between them all.

Eastman patted one of the men on the back, and the van made a turn, a little wild. She had to cling to the edge of the seat to hang on, and suddenly the van lurched to a stop and Eastman was kicking open the back doors.

Half of the men jumped out, a thump of boots and the turn of grit under four or five sets of feet. During the distraction of the unload, Castle’s fingers traced a faint design at her thigh, over and over, slowly and seductively and making her stomach flutter. 

She thought he was tracing letters. She had almost gotten the impression of the sentiment when the van doors slammed shut again.

Someone pounded on the side for the driver to go, the reverberations pounding in her head and face. The van started up again, rocketing forward, and now there were only four men left.

Castle’s hands were carefully in his lap, but his elbow nudged her side. Beckett had to close her eyes to suppress the smile that burned inside her.

Sometimes he knew exactly what she needed. Sometimes... oh, sometimes, he did all of it exactly right.

\-----

When the van pulled up in front of her apartment and the back doors opened, Beckett was the only one who got off. She stopped short on the sidewalk, glancing at him, but Castle waved her on, a warning in his eyes.

She stepped back and crossed her arms over her chest, gripping her elbows as Castle slammed the doors shut again. And then the van peeled out and she was alone before her building in the strange half-light of near dawn.

Beckett turned, glanced up the street the way they had come, then back down, confused, but all she saw were street-sweepers and the third watch coming off shift. No unwanted surveillance, not even Deleware out there. Beckett took a faltering step, still scanning the street, finally moved towards the security door of her building.

She had forgotten to grab her keys.

No. Seriously? Shit. She had forgotten her fucking keys. Fucking hell.

She’d left without her damn keys. She had a spare hidden in the hall upstairs, but she couldn’t even get in through the front security door. She was a fucking-

“Kate.” 

She froze, but it was Castle jogging towards her down the block, his face grim and flat in the dark-blonde light. He gave a strange little wave and then came to a halt before her, his hand falling, a slow fade of his smile.

“I don’t have my keys,” she said in a strangled voice.

“Oh,” he said finally. “Here. Let me.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his key - her key, the spare she thought she’d hidden in the hall. He pushed it into the security door and twisted the knob as he unlocked it, opened it with a bump of his hip. He held the door for her and gestured for her to go ahead of him, and somehow, he made it seem like she hadn’t been so scattered that she forgot her own keys.

Or her phone. Which, she supposed, had been a good thing, ideal for a clandestine body burning. 

His hand came to hers on the stairs, fingers lacing one by one through her own until their palms kissed. It felt more intimate than it should.

At her hall, Castle repeated the movement with the key, flipping open the lock to her door and ushering inside her own apartment. She came to a stop in her living room, staring down at the place where the blood had collected in a wide stain on her hardwood.

Castle’s hand came to her neck and she turned her body blindly into his, barreled into him so that he had steady her. Castle squeezed her nape, massaging the muscles, his cheek brushing the top of her head, his other arm coming around her.

“It’s done now, Kate. It’s done.”

She pressed her forehead into his collarbone, her shoulders hunched. He rubbed her back slowly, his other hand tangling in her hair, and his mouth touched the corner of her eye in a kiss that made her want to cry.

“I wish - wish I could say it’ll never happen again, but I have this sinking feeling in my guts that I’ve pulled you into a world of trouble.”

“I was already there,” she choked out, laying her cheek to his shoulder and closing her eyes. Just for a second. Just to keep her heart from trembling in her chest when he spoke. “I’m a cop, Castle. I’ve been there.”

“Your first kill.” His hand cupped the back of her skull. “For me. Because of me.”

She was trying not to think about it, trying not to remember the way the man’s body had felt at her back, the recoil of her face against the door. Trying not to think about how she’d put two in his chest and he’d kept coming, aimed again and shot him between the eyes.

But it ached.

“It just kills me.” His fingers petted her hair. “You going up against him.”

“I can take care of myself,” she muttered. But she realized her hands were clenching his biceps.

“You’re a rare woman,” he whispered. “Rare beauty. Rare wit. Intelligence, skill, and grace. That gorgeous smile, when it comes - rare as well.”

She froze in his arms, stunned by the words, by the way he saw her. That wasn’t the woman who had looked back at her in the mirror this morning.

Kate turned her face to him and touched her lips to his throat. He shivered, clutching her tighter, and she scraped her teeth over the hard place where he swallowed.

“Come to bed, Castle. Fuck me until I don’t see his face behind my eyelids.”

“Hell, love,” he groaned. “I’d give anything.”

She hushed him with her fingers, dragged her mouth to his earlobe, nipping. “Won’t make you pay this time. Save it for the street corner.”

He shuddered with a laugh and his arms came around her, lifting her off her feet. She had made him laugh and she didn’t mind hooking her arms at his neck. She wrapped her legs around his waist and he tucked his arms under her ass, started walking back with her for her bedroom.

She ached and she needed a fucking shower, and to sleep, but more, more, she needed him between her legs, the wild way he forced inside her, fucked her deep, passionate about it, about having her.

He’d give anything.

Castle had moved the whole damn world to get back to her - to be at her side for her first kill.

\-----

He laid her down on her bed and her eyes tumbled open. He was close, he was over her and pressing his kiss into her lips, stealing her breath.

“At night,” he whispered into her mouth. “At night I try to think of words to describe this.”

He moved down her body, his hands stroking up under her shirt and gripping her breasts. She gasped, curling up, but he pressed her back down, worked at her pants.

“Words,” she murmured, echoing the last thing she’d consciously gotten.  
“Alluring. Beautiful. Captivating. Decimating.”

“You - you going down the alphabet?” she gasped. His mouth hovered above her groin; she ached to have him there, but he kept going, hand enveloping her ankle as he tugged her pants off.

“Enviable.”

“Me?”

“Me,” he roughed, eyes flicking back to her. “Every man who sees you once, just once, Beckett, they want you. Enviable, right here, my body between your legs.”

“Shit,” she whispered, hips bucking up against him. He was heavy on her thighs, his mouth came down to the material of her panties, his tongue touched her and made the crotch wet inside and out.

“Frustrating,” he husked. “Me and you both, that one. How damn frustrated I am in the dark, away from you, my cock hard but your body here in New York and all I want to do is bury myself inside you.”

“Then fucking do it,” she groaned.

“Now that I’m here,” he hummed, his mouth so damn close she could cry. “I want to draw it out. Make you growl. That’s the ‘g’, sweetheart. When you growl for me.”

“You fucking growl more than I do,” she growled. Fuck. Fuck. She was growling. Fuck.

“Hot. Indomitable. Joy,” he husked. “Kinky as fuck, love. Man-eating. Nas-”

“Man-eating? I’ll fucking show you man-eating,” she snarled, jerking her legs from under him and flipping him around, shoving him down to her mattress. “You have too many fucking clothes on.”

“I was doing something here.”

“You should only be doing me.” She scraped her nails at his abs under his shirt and up to those flat nipples of his. He grunted but she saw how he fought to keep his eyes open and watch her, invested.

She shoved up his shirt and he lifted, helping her get it off of him. His hands came to her own shirt, tugging it from her body, and immediately they were chest to chest, skins overheated, flushed, burning.

Man-eating. “Noble,” she murmured. “Always trying to let me go first.” She caressed his ribs and down to the waistband of his pants, fumbled purposefully with his belt so that he felt her hands, her knuckles rubbing him.

“What?’ he murmured, his fingers gripping her ass, sliding under her panties, kneading.

“Noble. Open. Protective as fuck.” She grinned down into him, rocking her hips against the ridge of his thigh as she found his fucking hard cock. “Don’t have a ‘q’ - what could possibly-”

“Queen of this Castle.”

She groaned, their eyes clashing and holding, and then she was laughing, her head falling to his chest, the sweat of him like a taste in her mouth. He laughed with her, breathless, his mouth skating down her temple.

She skimmed her hands inside and found him again, the sheath of silk-skin around his already fierce erection. Noble was right, dedicating himself to her when he was this fucking hard.

He bucked his hips and she squeezed his cock in retaliation. “I’ll be your queen. Good enough for me. R?”

He teased her ass with his fingers. “Rawr.”

She giggled, appalled to hear it come out of her mouth, but he wrapped an arm around her neck, gripped hard, flipped them again so that she was on her back. Beckett tried to catch her breath but he was already going down her body, ripping the panties from her legs and tossing them over the side of the bed.

He put his face between her legs and she keened, knees coming up hard with the shock of his tongue and teeth cascading through her.

His lips met the lips of her sex and she was trembling. His fingers stroked inside while his tongue soothed.

“Salty,” he hummed. “Sacred. Sublime.”

“Sh-shit,” she gasped.

“Hmm, technically, yes, that’s an s-word.”

She moaned, closing her eyes against the feeling rushing up inside her. Castle’s mouth was so light, stroking her with brushes of his lips, faint licks of his tongue. She couldn’t stand it. She was so going to go up in flames.

“Rick,” she begged. Her arm folded over her eyes and her body arched against the invasion of his tongue. How he could touch her, how he said a few words and her body was this molten thing ready to burn.

And then he was eating her out, sucking hard and grinding his mouth into her cunt, fierce strokes of his tongue, demanding and insistent and brutal. She couldn’t stop her hips from writhing, couldn’t keep control of herself, the wild clutch of near-panic in her guts as her orgasm approached.

Suddenly she felt his hands pressing at her inside thighs, widening her to him, holding her down, and she was pinned, she was caught, he was forcing her towards climax.

He was breaking her open. Her womb contracted sharply, her back bowed, and she shouted as her orgasm burst into life inside her, shaking her senseless.

Castle slithered up her body, sucking and nipping, licking at her skin as he traveled until he was heavy and perfect on top of her. She opened her eyes with a slow drag of lids, watched him and the way his gaze adored her.

“Transcendent,” he breathed and lowered his mouth to stroke his tongue along hers.

Before she could respond, his cock was driving inside her cunt, a deep invasion, her body contracting around him on a surge of arousal.

He palmed her lower back and thrust. She cried out and gripped his shoulders, his cock so fucking hard that she felt it thick in her throat. He didn’t wait for her to get used to him, he just fucked her, stroking deep, rattling her bones with the force of him.

Making her take it.

Her body was a live wire, electricity running through her where his cock sparked her inside. She panted with every thrust, felt fucking pole-axed between her legs, split open.

“Fuck,” she growled. Growled. Shit, shit-

“I need you to come. You gotta come, Beckett.”

“Have - have already. Just-”

“I need to feel it. Feel you breaking, feel you clutching me. Come on, love. One more for me.”

She was going to catch on fire. Everything burned. His cock so damn wide and deep, her cunt already too raw from his mouth, the glorious ache of violence.

“Fucking hell, Kate. Don’t hold it back. Don’t torture me.”

“I need - I need-”

“Tell me. Tell me, so I can make you come.” He was thrusting wildly inside her, her body inside out with it.

“Hold - hold me down,” she croaked.

He rose up, their skins peeling away, her breasts heavy with need, and he stared down at her. His eyes were knife blades, a thrust between her ribs that she hadn’t seen coming, straight to the heart.

“Hold me down,” she insisted, determination growing. Certainty.

Castle’s eyes clouded, grey and storm-shuttered, and suddenly he was gripping both her wrists and yanking her arms above her head, his hips settling harder into the clutch of her thighs. He rammed his cock into her and she grunted, eyes wide.

“You better fucking come.”

She stared at him as he held her down, couldn’t help straining against him, and he pressed his forearms into her own and began pumping.

She couldn’t move. Her neck arched but he was there, his mouth over her, his teeth scraping her throat, his body rubbing hard. Every thrust was brutal, every grind of his hips made her ache all the more.

“Fuck. Right now, Kate. Right now, or so help me, I’ll fucking-”

She shouted with her orgasm, stunned by the violence of it, the way it ripped from her body. Castle gave a triumphant shout and climaxed with his cock deep, crushing her with his release, mad thrusts of his hips as he worked himself off.

She was a sweat-soaked, trembling mess but he worked his arms down and cradled her against him, panting just as hard as she was. He rolled to his back, taking her with him on his chest. Her eyes fell closed, and his lips brushed over her forehead.

“I never could find a word for ‘z’,” he murmured. “But just that it’s the end of things, zed, I want to begin and end right here with my cock inside you.”

And his cock was still inside her, somehow. Her thigh was thrown over his, his knee between hers, but his cock was still planted. Half-hard, ready to thicken again at any moment. Claiming her.

He combed his fingers through the hair at her neck, rubbed his thumb in the sweat at her nape. “I run through every letter in a blinding, gorgeous rush - an orgasm - and I barely have to touch myself. All the words I have now because of you, and all I want is to have you again.”

“Yes,” she roughed.

“Yes?”

“Have me again.”

He rolled her over and immediately bound her arms over her head, began moving inside her again.

\-----


	7. Chapter 7

She was molten.

He was sliding in and out of her continuously, his cock diving deep. She rolled with the thrust of his hips and met him, her arms stretched taut over her head. He held her there, moved easily, untiring, and it pulsed inside her.

His mouth roamed over her neck, suckled at her breast, came up again. He never stayed long enough to work her up, he just kept moving, moving, moving.

“Please, baby,” she whispered. She wanted so much, wanted it always; he was this constant ache between her legs.

“What do you want, Kate?”

She groaned, tried to hook her legs tighter around him. He refused to speed up, stroking deeply, sinking into her, withdrawing again. She was hot, everything was burning under her skin, he was keeping her circling, around and around that center of blinding light.

“What do you want, Kate?”

She needed him to just - to just - she needed him. 

“What do you want-”

“I just want you,” she begged. “Please, love. Please. Let me have you.”

He fell over her body, drawing his hands down to her breasts, kneading as his hips began to work, faster now, fiercer.

She wound her arms around his neck and shoulders, thrust up hard to flip them over. He went on his back, lifted his hands to her hair and combed it back as she stared down at him.

“You have me,” he murmured. “You have all of me, the good and the bad. All of me. Just take it.”

She couldn’t catch her breath, staring down at him, the vivid blue of his eyes. His fingers twisted in her hair and pinned it at her neck, his other hand dragged down her chest and to her breast, thumbing her nipple.

She lifted to her knees and he moaned in appreciation, eyes dragging, barely keeping her gaze. When she sank back down on his cock, she took him to the hilt, sheathing him, working her inside muscles to grip him like a fist.

He cursed and bucked under her, wild with it, and she grinned. Her hands came to his shoulders and planted for stability and she started to move.

He met her stroke for stroke, deep and perfect, the angle of her body making her clit grind against his cock. He was so high and tight inside her; she could feel the pulse of his erection behind her belly button, displacing all her organs to make room for him.

She fucked herself with him, and he took it, gripping her hips now, guiding her ride. She pushed back, the angle steeper, his penetration like being ripped apart. Castle pulled his knees up for her and she fell back against them, heart pounding.

Everything ached. She was going to burst into flames.

His palms branded her thighs and she panted for breath, arching and rising up, sinking down on him again. Castle growled at her, a command in his tone that she heeded, moving faster now, needing it.

His hands massaged her thighs until his thumbs split her sex over his cock. She gasped and jerked upright, and he rubbed her clit between his thumbs.

Kate shouted, orgasming in a sharp burst above him. He worked her still, deep and hard, and she felt the next one contracting like a noose, yanking her out of herself and leaving her sprawling on his chest.

His arms came around her and he stroked, four more thrusts before his climax washed over them both, leaving her shivering and him moaning her name. He rolled her over and laid himself on her like a blanket, and she was warm.

She was warm.

Kate circled an arm up and around his neck, turning her head to press her mouth to his neck. And now she could breathe, now she was just fine.

\-----

She was sprawled over his chest. She couldn’t move, her knees at his hips and her mouth open at his neck. His arms were around her, fingers combing through her hair, untangling it, brushing it over her nape and shoulders.

“Kate, you with me?”

“Hmm.”

“The gash over your eyebrow is bleeding again, sweetheart.”

“So.”

He huffed, laughter echoing somewhere in his ribs where she could feel it. She couldn’t help the smile that curled her lips.

“So, while I enjoy being sticky because of you, head wounds wasn’t really what I was going for.”

She sighed and moved to get off of him, but he kept his arms around her and held her down. 

“No, love. Stay right here a moment. I’ll do it.”

Do what?

Before she could quite figure him out, he was pressing the corner of her bed sheet into her forehead, cleaning her up. She let her eyes close and her mind drift, not paying attention, faintly registering the feel of his fingers skimming her cuts and bruises. 

“If the bones are cracked-”

“Just bruised,” she murmured. “Hush. Talking makes you vibrate.”

He grunted, another laugh, and even though she’d meant it - the vibrations bounced around in her head - she really loved hearing his laughter, feeling it, up against her like this.

“When you’re ready to move,” he whispered then, “we’ll see about these bruises.”

It sounded like a warning, but she was too tired to care.

\-----

She was vaguely aware of him all during the night. She woke often feeling the pulse of pain behind her eyes, in her cheeks, the back of her neck, but Castle was always right there, fingers stroking, a hum that was just enough off-tempo from the vibrating ache that she could fall back to sleep.

She woke once more when the sun came up, had that quiet and intense moment of panic thinking she was late to work before she remembered she’d called in sick because there had been a dead man in her living room.

She was awake now, though moving from this spot seemed unlikely - and undesirable. If she moved, she was afraid her head would split in half and roll right off her neck.

“Kate?” he whispered.

“Awake,” she sighed. He never slept.

“Go back to sleep,” he rebuked softly.

“Can’t.”

“Dream?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know.”

He was still under her; she was lying on top of him like he was a bear rug before a fireplace, but she couldn’t seem to make herself move. Or care. Or move. Fuck, she was a little worse for wear this morning.

“When you go back to work tomorrow, love, you’re gonna have to explain the bruises.”

“Mm.”

“I’ve arranged a guy at a gym to say you caught a punching bag in the face when someone came in on the equipment against regs.”

“What?” she slurred. Fuck, it all hurt.

“There’s even been an incident report filed with their insurance, like the gym would have to do. If you want me to, I can make your sergeant aware of it, or you can explain yourself.”

“How...?” she said numbly.

“The insurance company can take it up with the gym, make the requisite call to the local police to cover their ass.”

“But I’m not a member of any gym.”

“Mike’s Punch-Out,” he whispered, his lips at her ear. “You are now.”

“Oh,” she said, feeling dumb. “Do they spar?”

“They do.”

“I could maybe actually go. If they spar.”

“Yeah, love, you could go. The trainer is a guy I served with. Special Forces. You’d do well there.”

“Make it real,” she murmured.

“It’s all real,” he whispered. His fingers traced the shell of her ear and her eyes slammed shut, instantly drugged. “Baby, you with me?”

“Hmm.”

“I have a flight in six hours, love.”

She opened her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I wish I could take you to meet Mike. You’ll like him; he’s brutal on training. But before you go, you might head to a care clinic - there’s one two blocks down from here - they can stitch up the gash over your eye.”

“No. I’m fine.”

“It keeps opening up. I slipped out while you were sleeping and got you more butterfly bandages, but I don’t know that it’ll hold. They might paint on that sealant.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she sighed. “I’m fine. It works.”

“Okay,” he whispered. “Okay. Your dad coming with Cujo this morning?”

“Yeah.”

“I should leave before he gets here.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“We can’t talk about this after today, love.”

“Oh?”

“Well, you and me, like this, of course we can. But not to your father - no, hey guess where I was last night.”

“No,” she chuckled, immediately regretted it. Her face was a pulse point of aching tenderness. And then she remembered Adrian Foley and the brutal violence of his hand gripping her neck and slamming her face into the door and she flinched.

“You waking up a little?”

“Yeah,” she whispered, sucking in a breath. “Surprised I didn’t have - dreams.”

“Me too. God knows I have enough dreams about him. But he’s dead.”

She nodded and it hurt. It really hurt. “Tell me the story?” she asked. “Distract me. I want to know why he came after me so hard.”

Castle let out a strangled breath and his arms hugged her a little tighter. His chest was wide and expanding with his effort, and she could ride the sea of his breathing forever.

His voice was right at her ear when it came. “The story of your heroic deeds of valor and bravery in the face of the terrible-”

“Not that story. Your story,” she laughed, wincing when it echoed in her head. “Aw, fuck, don’t make me laugh. That really hurts.”

“Sorry, I’m sorry. My story. The story of me and Adrian Foley.”

“Yeah, that,” she murmured.

“He ran a great con, as my father called it, and I didn’t see it coming.”

“A con.”

“A trick. A play. I was conned into believing Colleen was in love with me when she was, in fact, Adrian Foley’s long-time, on-again off-again girlfriend.”

“Colleen,” she murmured, shifting a knee down to ease her body’s distribution over him. Castle hadn’t let go. 

“Colleen,” he sighed back.

Kate stroked her fingers at the roughness of his jaw. “She broke your heart,” she whispered, her chest tightening.

“I don’t know that she had my heart to break. I don’t know that I could - get there. But she broke my trust, she broke my confidence in myself, she broke my spirit.”

Kate put her palm to his neck, felt his pulse moving against her touch. “What did she do?”

“I flipped a guy in Foley’s organization, sent a runner to my dead drop to leave the information for a contact, and she murdered him.”

“She murdered... your runner?”

“He was a little boy,” Castle said softly. “He was just a kid and I used him and she used me. Then she kept me out of town long enough for Foley to round up the snitch and have him fucking butchered. They hung the pieces in my windows, left the kid in a heap at my back door.”

“Shit,” she whispered. A little boy. A kid. Dumped like trash.

“And all the while, I was thinking, she’s in love with me; she knows who I am if not what; I can tell her all of it.” 

“Did you tell her?” Kate said, her voice tight.

“No. I never broke cover for her.”

“What happened then?”

“Colleen happened. I’d gone to find her, misguided attempt to get her clear of the place. I told her that her life was in danger and she - well, she had me down at the loch behind her family’s old farm. It was a complicated - I don’t know, stripping and swimming nude somehow was supposed to prove we weren’t afraid; she wasn’t going to run.”

Kate tucked her chin in against his chest. “You were trying to keep her safe.”

“We were swimming and I felt her at my back, felt her there, and suddenly I knew. A premonition. Instinct. And she said, It’s a shame about the boy. Only I hadn’t told her that he’d been killed. And then she was sliding her arm around my neck, up high, gripping my jaw, and her other arm came up to slit my throat.”

“Fuck,” Kate croaked out. She could picture it all too well.

“I grabbed for the knife and we - wrangled over it - thrashing in the water.”

Tried to slit his throat. Colleen had tried to slit his throat in the water and Kate knew the scar; she was running her fingers over it right now. This place where that woman had tried to take him from her.

“I couldn’t get the knife; she kept cutting me, shallow wounds, superficial, but I couldn’t stay out there all night wrestling with her when I knew my cover had been blown. Massively blown. So badly blown that I didn’t even know where to start.”

“God.”

“But I thought I still had a chance; I was going to salvage something. If I could just get free of her... so I came up behind her in the water and snapped her neck.”

Fuck.

“I ran back to town but Foley had cleared everyone and everything out. It was my - first civilian kill. I’d killed people in the army, but Ireland was my first covert op anyway, and okay, there had been a guard I had to dispatch, but Colleen had been - different.”

“It was personal.”

“It was.” Castle shifted in bed so that they were lying face to face, his fingers lightly touching her cheek. “Adrian Foley wanted to make it very personal. I’m so damn lucky that I chose the one woman in all of New York - all of the world - who can hold her own.”

She turned her mouth and kissed his fingers, but the movement cost her. Her whole bone structure ached so badly. “I didn’t ruin your mission, did I?”

“No, love. Everything is just fine.”

She didn’t believe him.

“Come on, now. You really think I’d be so unprofessional? You’ve seen me at work - am I anything less than stellar?”

She laughed then, though it hurt, and slid her arm around his waist. “You are quite stellar. Forgive me. What was I thinking?”

“It’s the bump on the head. Makes you confused. Don’t worry. I forgive you.”

“So magnanimous.”

“Especially in bed. I have six hours you know.”

“Oh, yes,” she hummed, smiling slowly at him. That hurt too, but she tried to reach for him.

Castle caught her by the wrist. “Not-uh. I’m giving, not taking,” he said, already pushing his fingers into her pants and between her legs.

She moaned, arching into the touch of him. “Castle. But. You-”

“Hush, love. Consider this your reward for catching an international terrorist.”

He was stroking her clit with his fingers; she was climbing fast towards such great heights, clinging to his arm.

Six hours.

He started to talk - whispers about her body, her mouth, the heat of her sex, how sick he felt when he saw her battered face, how proud she was alive, how damn proud I am to have you.

She fell apart in his arms, with his mouth at her ear, his words melting through her being.

\-----


End file.
